Big Data is not a fad. The name might disappear, but it will be an enterprise capability permanently.

Big Data refers to all that data inside and outside your organization that you always wanted to get access to but couldn’t. It is represented by streams of structured and unstructured information from sensors, images, audio, video, click streams, social media posts, GPS signals, databases, and transaction records. This massive pool of data is a rich resource for big value.

For example, UPS harnessed engine sensor data from its truck fleet to detect heat and vibration patterns correlating with breakdowns. By identifying these patterns as early breakdown indicators, the company was able to keep its fleet running while minimizing costly repairs.

When it comes to success with Big Data, it’s about the details. Generating success means aligning IT and business strategy, mobilizing resources, and developing an effective Big Data solution strategy and plan—an epic challenge. And the race for value is on. Any organization with hopes of remaining relevant in this environment of rapidly expanding data streams must be recognized as a digitally driven enterprise.

Why? In a word, results. According to the Harvard Business Review, data-driven enterprises demonstrate greater productivity and higher revenue growth. And Big Data is a fertile ground for mining valuable insights and feeding predictive capabilities. Successfully mining, analyzing, and incorporating Big Data into the enterprise will heighten your agility and sharpen your competitive edge.

The CIO Challenge

Data is hitting the enterprise from all sides in massive amounts at an accelerating rate. Ninety percent of all of the data in the world today has been created just in the last two years. Example: In 2012, there were 2.7 trillion gigabytes of data globally. That sum is expected to grow to 40 trillion gigabytes by 2020. Massive amounts of useful enterprise information are getting lost in the deluge.

Yet the most significant challenge is not the amount of data or the ability to process it. It’s distilling useful information and integrating it into the enterprise to generate value. For this reason, analytics will become the central driver of application development in the future.

A Hewlett Packard Enterprise-led survey of a sample of business leaders and CIOs tells us that there’s much work to do. Some of the feedback included statements such as:

“I need to accelerate the time to gain insight.”

“I need to process these structured and unstructured data streams to see what values are there and incorporate them into my business processes.”

But across all the analyses we conducted, one relationship stood out: The more organizations characterized themselves as data driven, the better they performed on objective measures of financial and operational results. In particular, companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5 percent more productive and 6 percent more profitable than their competitors.

Aggravating enterprise data challenges is the burgeoning shortage of data scientists—an estimated 140,000 to 190,000 unfilled slots will exist by 2019. That’s in addition to the shortage of middle and senior managers with the skills to incorporate Big Data analytics into the enterprise.

Big Data Discovery Experience

Enter HPE’s Big Data Discovery Experience, a two-step process of first, discovery, and second, implementation. Its focus is aligning IT with the enterprise. The goal: dramatically reduce the time and risk it takes to generate insights and make decisions.

This is not like a back office sandbox with a small POC running on somebody’s laptop. This is industrial-strength analytical capability. The Discovery Experience integrates unstructured data, such as Twitter, Facebook, and blog feeds, with structured enterprise data. The objective is to intensify insights into your markets and customers and accelerate the path to value.

In the future, analytics will be seamlessly embedded in business processes—far away from where we are today. In four years, the term “Big Data” likely won’t even exist, because Big Data is really just all of the data in your enterprise, and all of the data that surrounds us. Markets will demand that everybody has it. It won’t be this shiny new thing anymore. Big Data will become regular data—something you have to have to remain competitive.